DIRECTIVES given by Road Transport and Bridges Ministry to improve roads are yet to be fulfilled. The nine most important directives are largely ignored by the officials that resulted in assured road safety and communication initiatives undone. The bureaucratic tangle, pressure and in-cooperation by road and highways workers unions, transport owners association and other vested groups with support from some influential Ministers are the main obstacle of easing road safety measures. The government must handle the troublemakers and establish rules of law as most of the road accidents are avoidable by taking proper steps. Without reaching road safety and automated traffic and signals management, the prospective development would be unattained.
After the enactment of the Road Transport Act in September 2018, the Road Transport and Bridges Minister directed the BRTA to prepare rules for the law. Till now the rules were not completed. On June 1 this year, the draft rules were sent to the Legislative and Parliamentary Affairs Division for vetting while the division sent it back with a request for re-evaluation of 18 sections. At present, several lakh battery-run three-wheelers, including easy-bikes and rickshaws, run all over the country defying a High Court directive issued on August 3, 2015, to keep all unfit motor vehicles off the roads. The directive for expediting the works for turning the Dhaka-Sylhet and the Chattogram-Cox’s Bazar national highways into four-lane also remains unimplemented. The proposal for turning the Dhaka-Sylhet highway to the four-lane road has already been sent to the Planning Commission. For checking overloading on highways and roads, in 2018, the road transport division took an initiative for a project to build axle load stations at the sources of goods-carrying vehicles on the important highways which proposed to acquire land in 18 districts for this purpose. The alleged non-cooperation by both the police and the ridesharing companies is delaying the incorporation of the national helpline number 999 in the ridesharing apps.
Development of rules and regulation and other infrastructure is a cumulative process to ease road communications and road safety measures. With the infrastructural development by the government, sluggish bureaucratic channel and dillydallies push back the government initiatives on roads communication and transport system.
